Texas Turns Battleground as Cowboy Boots Win Hispanics

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Alex Steele begins his pitch on how
to turn Texas into a Democratic state like any good politician,
with the story of how he got to this place.

It begins in California’s Central Valley, where he grew up:
his father working two jobs to support four boys, his mother
disabled by illness. He saw the importance of health care in his
mother’s treatments and his father’s hip replacements. Student
loans and an athletic scholarship helped make him the first in
his family to attend college.

He was inspired to politics by Barack Obama, and left his
job and home to work for his campaign in Iowa in 2008 when few
people thought the first-term senator from Illinois could win.

It took him to Colorado to work for Obama’s 2012 re-election and now it’s brought him to Texas to try to build
something even more lasting. And yes, Steele says to approving
nods, he’s always worn cowboy boots.

He is talking to a group of about 50 activists sitting on
plastic folding chairs in Room 101 of the Killeen Community
Center, about 70 miles north of the state capital in Austin.
Steele is the field director for Battleground Texas, a group
that is the offspring of the president’s data-driven grassroots
organization that many credit with securing his second term.
Local Democrats bring a sheet cake that says “Welcome
Battleground Texas. Game on Killeen.”

Steele, 31, and others have come to Texas on a mission as
large as the state’s 261,000 square miles: to capitalize on the
surge in Hispanic population and turn the Lone Star State into a
two-party competitive one instead of the place where the
Republican nominee has carried every presidential election since
1976.

Simple Goal

“Our goal is very simple,” Steele said. “It’s to turn
Texas back into a battleground state by treating it like a
battleground state.”

Population trends are on his side, even if the history of
the last quarter-century is not. The transformation underway in
Texas is one of many that exemplify how changing demographics
are shifting the nation’s political makeup as well.

In addition to becoming less white, it is also less rural,
with 96 of its 254 counties losing population as urban areas
grew.

Change won’t come easy to a state rooted in the
“Everything is bigger in Texas” ethos of its billboards, where
one toll road has a speed limit of 85 miles an hour and business
interests in energy, led by Exxon Mobil Corp.; technology
giants, including Texas Instruments Inc. and Dell Inc.; and
health-care companies such as Tenet Healthcare Corp. have strong
Republican inclinations and an established network for wielding
influence.

Hispanic Growth

Yet there is a sense of inevitability to the effort, if the
Democratic voting patterns of Hispanics continue.

“It’s just a question of time before the state turns
Democrat,” said Lloyd Potter, the Texas State demographer.
“When that happens, 2020 to 2025? It could even happen
before.”

Potter said that 65 percent of the population growth in the
state from 2000 to 2010 was among Hispanics, a trend that shows
no sign of slowing.

Texas is the only one of the four majority-minority states
that didn’t vote for Obama in 2012. Its Latino population makes
up about 38 percent of the population, yet cast only 22 percent
of the votes, according to research by Mark Jones, chairman of
the political science department at Rice University in Houston.
Jones forecast that by 2030, the Hispanic voting-age population
will rise to 43 percent of the electorate, while the white share
will drop to 39 percent from about 50 percent.

Low Turnout

In 2008, if Hispanics in Texas had voted at the same rate
as those in California, Jones found, Republican nominee John
McCain would have defeated Obama by 6 percentage points instead
of 12. In addition, if the 700,000 eligible, lawful permanent
residents were granted a path to citizenship under immigration
legislation being considered in Congress, the margin would have
been even smaller.

One fact is a near certainty: The Texas population, its 25
million residents second only to California, will continue to
grow, having outpaced the national average in every census since
1850.

Steele and others have come to solve an electoral riddle
that has vexed his party -- how to persuade the estimated 2.2
million Hispanics who are eligible to vote and didn’t in 2012 to
cast Democratic ballots in 2014 and beyond. If they can solve
it, and they don’t expect to before 2020, it would be almost a
mathematical impossibility for Republicans to win the White
House given the nation’s current political makeup.

Inexorable Path

“It is not a question of if Texas will become a swing
state, but when,” Matthew Dowd, an Austin-based political
analyst who was a principal strategist for President George W.
Bush. “Demography is inexorably pushing Texas from solid
Republican state to swing state over time. And it is a serious
problem for Republicans in putting together a winning electoral
coalition as Texas does move to a swing state.”

Still, Republicans point to at least 102 reasons their
partisan adversaries won’t succeed. That’s the number of
consecutive victories they’ve had in statewide elections,
according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office, a streak
that goes back to 1994. With that record of success, Republican
Governor Rick Perry dismissed the Battleground Texas effort as a
“pipe dream.”

That string won’t end any time soon, said Mike Baselice a
Republican polling expert.

“Republicans are going to win all the statewide races in
the next cycle in 2014 because the state leans 10 points more
Republican than Democrat,” he said. And, if Republican
candidates win about 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, at least
for the near future, their lock on state offices will continue.

Top Financier

To pull off its organizational effort, Battleground needed
money. So one of their first stops was to visit Steve Mostyn,
the top Democratic donor in Texas, who was told the program
would require an annual budget of about $10 million, Mostyn
said. He is confident he can help raise that money, and noted he
and his wife, Amber, contributed more than $10 million to party
candidates and groups in 2012.

“I am a skeptic whenever anybody comes to me about
money,” Mostyn said. He was ultimately convinced because
organizers for Battleground Texas had proof the concept works
from their success in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Jenn Brown, 31, the executive director of Battleground
Texas, led the Obama campaign’s ground operation in Ohio. The
campaign turned out 100,000 additional African-American voters
in the state, and increased young voters’ participation by using
the same techniques they want to deploy in Texas.

Long-Term Investment

“We’ve decided to make a long-term investment,” Mostyn
said. “We are going to work on building infrastructure that is
missing in Texas. You’ve got to have some discipline. You have
got to have a little longer vision. The goal is not to win the
2014 governor’s race, but to do the things they’ve done so
effectively in Ohio.”

“You want to turn your football team around, you go find a
coach who’s been winning somewhere else,” he said.

Steele uses a small projector to beam a slide show on a
pale yellow wall of the community center’s Room 101. He explains
how Battleground Texas will use the exponential power of voter
contact in the same way that Obama did, enhancing traditional
methods with a technological tour de force.

Rather than having 250 paid organizers each make 50
contacts and yield 12,500 voter touches, their goal is to have
250 field organizers overseeing five teams of volunteer
neighborhood leaders who use their own Facebook Inc., Twitter
Inc. and e-mail accounts to make 500,000 contacts.

Community Organizing

On this night, activists filled out contact information on
paper and he conducted the session as an old-school community
organizer would, trying to get buy-in, encouraging people there
to empower others and benefit from a multiplier effect.

What Brown and Steele face, though, are long-standing
patterns of behavior. The potential Hispanic vote has been large
for longer than they have been alive, and it has never reached
its potential.

“The turnout rate is a problem that is much easier to
talk about than it is to solve,” said James Henson, who directs
the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin.
“And it is a problem that Democrats have been talking about for
a decade and a half at least.”

Resources have been a fundamental problem for the party,
said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic
Party. National Democrats, including Obama, come to the state to
raise money they spend elsewhere, he said.

ATM State

“People lovingly refer to it as an ATM state,” Brown
said. “The rule of Battleground Texas is that every dollar we
raise stays here in Texas.”

Brown, another California native, is mindful of not trying
to offer a know-it-all pose to activists who have been working
the state for decades. “If you roll out a statewide strategy
and say this is how you have to do it, rural or urban, then it
won’t work. It has to be more about the community people live
in.” Battleground workers will target Latino social clubs and
house parties.

“The biggest thing is you ask people to participate and
you have people they trust make the ask,” Brown said. “That’s
really where the organizing comes in and people talking to their
neighbors comes in. You can pretty quickly break down a lot of
the barriers.”

‘Secret Sauce’

Mostyn said the Obama team’s strategy will work with “a
little bit of secret sauce. It is a very simple thing that is
very hard to execute, effectively and efficiently communicating
and organizing and walking in communities. They know how to keep
all the trains on time and on track and that’s not easy to do
when building a ground game.”

Another problem they must confront has been a form of
benign neglect. Representative Joaquin Castro, 38, said the
Obama campaign shared research with him that showed 50 percent
of all eligible Hispanic voters in Colorado had been contacted
while in Texas the number was only 25 percent.

“They have not been approached in a serious way about
helping transform the state,” Castro said. “It is easier to do
nothing because the task can seem so large and the cost to be
competitive so great.”

Cruz, Bush

They are placing bets that politicians such as U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz, an Republican Hispanic elected in 2012, and George P.
Bush, the son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who is running
for Texas Land Commissioner, will stem voter defections to
Democrats. The younger Bush, born in Houston, educated at Rice,
is fluent in Spanish and his mother, Columba, is from Mexico.

They also are counting on incumbents being rewarded by the
state’s improving economy, which expanded at a 4.1 percent
annual rate in December, according to a March 13 Federal Reserve
Bank of Dallas report, with signs pointing to continued
expansion. It also has recovered all job losses caused by the
recession, state data show. The state unemployment rate is 6.4
percent, below the 7.6 rate nationally.

A final challenge for Democrats is getting Hispanics to see
why voting should matter to them.

Hinojosa said participation is low in part because, unlike
African-Americans, Hispanics had no equivalent of the civil
rights movement that emphasized voting as the means to political
change. Even though politicians such as President Lyndon
Johnson, a Texas Democrat who taught Mexican-American students
in Cotulla as a young man, have had connections with Hispanics,
there hasn’t been a long-term effort to stoke participation.

Not Destiny

“Demographics are not destiny, they are opportunity,”
Hinojosa said. “Clearly everybody knows the reason why we are
not a Democratic state is because there has been a large under-performing Hispanic community at election time.”

Representative Castro, whose district includes San
Antonio, the seventh largest city in the U.S., said Democrats
finally see the potential that the state’s changing demographics
represent.

“What I see now is the first serious and earnest effort to
climb out of that hole,” Castro said as he sipped a hot
chocolate at a Starbucks in Austin.

Castro and his identical twin brother, Julian Castro, the
mayor of San Antonio and keynote speaker at the 2012 Democratic
National Convention in Charlotte, both Harvard Law School
graduates, are often mentioned as possible statewide candidates
who could accelerate the partisan shift.

Castro Brothers

“They fit the bill for the thinking of the moment and are
obviously not without skills and represent a certain model of
Democratic leader that Barack Obama has ratified, upwardly
mobile, Ivy League educated, very capable,” Henson said.
“There is a real temptation among Democrats to seize on a
person or two who is going to deliver them from the wilderness
and I am not sure that is the most effective long-term model.”

Steele doesn’t talk to the activists in Killeen about
specific candidates or specific races. His is a longer game.

“What we say to anybody who says we can’t do this, we say
game on,” he said.